How completely people may change, even within a few hours, was well illustrated as they stood side by side and regarded their work with as much pride as if it had been the result of their honest efforts of years.  They were now pen and brush crooks of the first caliber, had reduced forgery to a fine art and demonstrated what an amateur might do.  For, although they did not know it, nearly half the fifteen millions or so lost by forgeries every year was the work of amateurs such as they.

The next problem was presenting the check for collection.  Of course Carlton could not put it through his own bank, unless he wanted to leave a blazed trail straight to himself.  Only a colossal bluff would do, and in a city where only colossal bluffs succeed it was not so impossible as might have been first imagined.

Luncheon over, they sauntered casually into a high-class office building on Broadway where there were offices to rent.  The agent was duly impressed by the couple who talked of their large real estate dealings.  Where he might have been thoroughly suspicious of a man and might have asked many embarrassing but perfectly proper questions, he accepted the woman without a murmur.  At her suggestion he even consented to take his new tenants around to the Uptown Bank and introduce them.  They made an excellent impression by a first cash deposit of the money Carlton had thrown down on the table the night before.  A check for the first month’s rent more than mollified the agent and talk of a big deal that was just being signed up to-day duly impressed the bank.

The next problem was to get the forged check certified.  That, also, proved a very simple matter.  Any one can walk into a bank and get a check for $25,000 certified, while if he appears, a stranger, before the window of the paying teller to cash a check for twenty-five dollars he would almost be thrown out of the bank.  Banks will certify at a glance practically any check that looks right, but they pass on the responsibility of cashing them.  Thus before the close of banking hours Dunlap was able to deposit in his new bank the check certified by the Gorham.

Twenty-four hours must elapse before he could draw against the check which he had deposited.  He did not propose to waste that time, so that the next day found him at Green & Co.’s, feeling much better.  Really he had come prepared now to straighten out the books, knowing that in a few hours he could make good.

The first hesitation due to the newness of the game had worn off by this time.  Nothing at all of an alarming nature had happened.  The new month had already begun and as most firms have their accounts balanced only once a month, he had, he reasoned, nearly the entire four weeks in which to operate.

Conscience was dulled in Constance, also, and she was now busy with ink eraser, the water colors, and other paraphernalia in a wholesale raising of checks, mostly for amounts smaller than that in the first attempt.